Poet Warrior
CBC Books | | Posted: January 13, 2022 7:04 PM | Last Updated: January 14, 2022
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.
Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth — owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants and a smooth green snake curled up surprise. She celebrates the influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo horse songs, rain, and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife and community member.
Moving fluidly between prose, song and poetry, Harjo recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. Poet Warrior sings with the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo. (From WW Norton)
Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections and one previous memoir, Crazy Brave. Named poet laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa where she is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.
From the book
I return to the stories that I was told, the stories that I can't seem to remember or keep straight to the telling, like the ones I heard when I used to drive my aunt Lois around the Creek Nation to visit our relatives — all her age and older, which is the age I am now. This was when I was in my twenties and thirties, when she lived in her apartment on the West Eighth Street in Okmulgee, before she was disabled with a stroke and taken to a nursing home to live out the last few years of her life. Every day I miss her cultural knowledge of our people, her insight and humor. I miss the historical documents and family artifacts that crowded her small apartment that told of our family's part in the forced march from the South to Indian Territory, to what became known as Oklahoma. These stacks contained written accounts of family stories of bravery and justice, but left out the stories she told me, of favorite black dogs, horse magic, bending time, how to avoid the places where known conjurers lived, and of the Spanish man accompanying the people on the trail, who wore a diamond pin that glittered as he sat tall on his horse. One of her paintings accompanies me through my life since her passing. It is the painting of a Taos man pulling a piece of pottery out of the fire. She used to make many trips to the Southwest and was friends with many of the Pueblo people, including Maria Martinez, the San Ildefonso potter. I am now friends with their grandchildren.
From Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo ©2022. Published by WW Norton.